Becker Library is pleased to announce a new series of events — the Becker archives roadshow — that will begin in the Fall of 2026. The Becker archives roadshow is intended to highlight interesting and fun aspects of the 100+-year-old WashU Medicine campus, while also increasing awareness of Becker Library’s wonderful archival collections. On most [Read more]
We often value books for their text. The text is, of course, the book’s reason for being, and book binding evolved in order to protect precious pages. But bindings have their own stories to tell, and those interested in the material aspects of book history have long appreciated them. In this post, we’ll take a [Read more]
The Becker Library exhibit “Compounding Potential – A History of the Neurosciences at WashU” gives a brief historical overview of neuroscience research at Washington University. The exhibit still is on display in the Glaser Gallery on the 7th floor of the Bernard Becker Medical Library for a few more days in June 2026 so it [Read more]
528 recently digitized issues of BJC Today are now accessible through the Digital Commons@Becker. Digital Commons@Becker is an institutional repository designed to share the scholarly work and research materials of WashU Medicine with a broad audience, and to make them more easily accessible. Becker Archives uses the Digital Commons to make certain archival materials more [Read more]
Before it evolved into one of the bestselling medical texts ever published, the Washington Manual began as a series of notes and observations compiled by internal medicine residents rounding at Barnes Hospital in the early 1940s. These “treatment pro tips” were collected throughout the course of a year of clinical rounding, and then assembled into [Read more]
This past April, the Center for the History of Medicine once again sponsored a trip to Europe for Phase 3 medical students as part of the Dissecting the Past elective. Head of Rare Books Elisabeth Brander, Professors of Anatomy Amy Bauernfeind and Krikor Dikranian, and 11 students with an interest in exploring the history of [Read more]
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through the more than 800 slides found in the Institute for Biomedical Computing Records (RG035). The collection includes materials related to the Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC) and its predecessors, the Biomedical Computer Laboratory (BCL) and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL). Established in 1964, BCL [Read more]
May 1st, or May Day, has been a holiday associated with the arrival of summer for millennia. But dancing around maypoles is not the only way that you can celebrate the day—it can also be a good day for those suffering from scrofula to petition for divine assistance. Scrofula is a disease that we don’t [Read more]
Georg Bartisch’s Augendienst is one of the most famous books in the history of ophthalmology. While it is not the first ophthalmologic text to be printed in the vernacular German, it is perhaps the first text to grant the subject such elaborate treatment: Augendienst is no cheap pamphlet with basic illustrations, but a large folio [Read more]
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